Hurricane Maria

Before the sun rose on the first day of 2018, someone called 911 to report the charred, bullet-riddled body of a man with a snake-like tattoo on his left hand, lying beside a road in the Puerto Rican town of Vega Baja.

The next day, two men were found dead with their feet and hands bound in Bayamon, a working-class city southwest of the capital. Another man was shot to death before dawn in nearby Vega Baja while trying to stop thieves from stealing his generator.

Thirty-two people have been slain in Puerto Rico in the first 11 days of the year, double the number killed over the same period in 2017. If the surge proves to be more than just a temporary blip, January could be the...

Related "Hurricane Maria" Articles

Before the sun rose on the first day of 2018, someone called 911 to report the charred, bullet-riddled body of a man with a snake-like tattoo on his left hand, lying beside a road in the Puerto Rican town of Vega Baja.
The next day, two men were found...

When former Vice President Al Gore released his documentary in 2006 entitled An Inconvenient Truth, somehow the public was lectured with the consequences of global warming. Some may have missed it or did not pay attention. But truth of the...

Puerto Rico authorities said Friday that nearly half of power customers in the U.S. territory still lack electricity more than three months after Hurricane Maria, sparking outrage among islanders who accuse the government of mismanaging its response to...

Three days before Christmas, Doris Martinez and daughter Miriam Narvaez joined their neighbors in a line outside city hall in Morovis, a town of 30,000 people still living without electricity in the mountains of central Puerto Rico more than three...

After Hurricane Maria damaged tens of thousands of homes in Puerto Rico, a newly created Florida company with an unproven record won more than $30 million in contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency tarps and plastic...

Two months after Hurricane Maria, many of Isaias Rivera's relatives in Puerto Rico still live without regular electricity.
Cellphone service is spotty at best — transportation is limited and his siblings often face long lines for basic necessities,...

On September 6, Hurricane Irma produced 100 mile-per-hour winds and cut off power to two-thirds of the island of Puerto Rico. Just a couple weeks later, Hurricane Maria made landfall and knocked out the entire island's power.
By the beginning of...

The lights remain off in bustling cities and in small rural villages. Gas generators, the only alternative to the downed power lines that seem to be everywhere, continuously hum outside hospitals and bodegas. When night falls, it’s the glow of car lights,...

The director of Puerto Rico's power company resigned on Friday amid ongoing blackouts and scrutiny of a contract awarded to a small Montana-based company to help rebuild the electric grid destroyed by Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico's Electric Power...

Puerto Rico's government scored a big win in court Monday when a judge rejected the appointment of a former military officer to oversee the U.S. territory's troubled power company.
A federal control board overseeing Puerto Rico's finances had sought to...

More than 1,400 medical school students, faculty and staff who’ve been attending classes on a cruise ship since Hurricane Maria will move yet again — this time to Tennessee.
Students at the Dominica-based Ross University School of Medicine have been...

The pace of deaths quickened on Puerto Rico immediately after Hurricane Maria — well beyond the number of deaths officially attributed to the Category 4 storm.
Officials in the U.S. territory on Wednesday reported the island had an average of 82 deaths a...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s devastation, many Puerto Ricans fled the Caribbean Island to stay with families in Chicago. A month later, they have learned that the path home may be a long and winding road.
Some remain in the Chicago area, while...

The head of Puerto Rico's power company said Sunday the agency is cancelling its $300 million contract with Whitefish Energy Holdings amid scrutiny of the tiny Montana company's role in restoring the island's power system.
The announcement by Ricardo...

I just returned from a four-day trip delivering supplies and food from the people of Chicago to towns in Puerto Rico such as Loiza, Comerio, Dorado and Toa Baja.
More than a month after Hurricane Maria hit on Sept. 20, power is still out on most parts of...

The narrow blue cobblestone streets of Old San Juan are deserted. Cigar shops are boarded up. Boutiques in bright colonial buildings are closed. "It's like a ghost town," said Mike Maione, a 57-year-old tourist from Flanders, New Jersey, who was staying...

Cheez-It crackers. Beef jerky. Shelf-stable "tuna chunks."
It may sound like the contents of a college vending machine, but these are actually among the foods that thousands of Puerto Ricans have been living on for the last month.
Panned by San Juan...

For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico's crippled electrical grid, the territory's state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall.
The company,...

For more than a month now, former North Auroran Ryan Stutzman has lived a simpler life.
Simpler, as in having limited access to the basics most of us take for granted, such as electricity, running water and being able to access Google with the tip of...